1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to storage devices, and specifically, to an apparatus and method for mounting a plurality of small form factor (SFF) storage devices in place of a larger SFF hard disk drive.
2. Background Information
Over the past two decades, storage device capacities have steadily increased, while at the same time the physical size of the devices has decreased. As capacities of storage devices increase, including 3.5″ hard disk drives, the performance of multi-drive systems can suffer due to the increase in access time required to retrieve the same amount of data from the hard drives. This is due to the fact that most multi-drive systems incorporate a RAID striping algorithm that evenly distributes the data to the storage devices. Evenly distributing the same amount of data to fewer drives decreases the overall system performance.